Who recommends it
- The Funniest Books of All TimeReading list
The device of the patient on the couch ranting to his shrink about all that’s wrong with him: his parents, his rabbi, his community, the rest of the world, and is an interesting device for the author to jettison his own beefs and get his rocks off on the human race. And Portnoy seems to be Roth’s boldest character. I…
- Tim KasherInterview
Sure, I also love Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates, Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth, Jesus’ Son by Denis Johnson, Lawd Today! by Richard Wright, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway, A Heartbreaking Work Of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers, Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion and…
- David PapineauInterview
I don’t have any sort of personal bible, but I might as well mention Catch-22 by Joseph Heller and Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth here. I was a bit young and not English enough for the 1950s angry young men to speak directly to me, but Heller and Roth showed me and my friends the absurdity of many conventional…
- Jeremy ZuckermanInterview
Ninety-Two in the Shade by Thomas McGuane, Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer, The Spike by Damien Broderick, Moby Dick by Herman Melville, The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, No Place to Hide by Glenn Greenwald, The Soundscape by R. Murray Schafer, The ‘Rama’ series by Arthur C. Clarke, The Rosy…
- Jake WeismanInterview
Since I started to pursue my career in comedy 7 years ago, my reading schedule has been wildly erratic, and it is a source of shame for me. I sometimes will go half a year without reading a book, then inhale 5 books in a month, then not make any time for reading for a few months again. I wish I were in jail so I could…
- Shane Joseph: The Page Is SacredInterview
Sabbath’s Theater by Philip Roth. I am told it is even more sexually explicit than Portnoy’s Complaint, and I am trying to find out how far this author went in his writing without tripping off the censors even in our liberal western democracies.
Often recommended alongside
The RoadMore books by Philip Roth our guests recommend
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